Low Poly Curve - Baking issues

Haftoof

So I'm still learning the ins and outs of normal mapping, low poly topology and baking, working on a DOTA 2 model. 

Anyways here's my issue: I'm trying out a few different options including skew meshes...   This is the problem I'm getting with the basic mesh:

From the front of the horn if we zoom in rather close we see some shading along the edge but it appears off... 


Here's the normal Map:


Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'm not even sure how important this is to resolve, but I'd like to know the technique for my own learning. 

Thoughts? 

musashidan

See the sticky here: 'who put waviness in my normal map' adding more geo to your low poly to better represent the silhouette will solve this issue. The waviness can clearly be seen in the NM map.

Haftoof

Yeah but there is no more room for GEO due to the limited poly count.   Would a Skewmap help reduce the waviness? 

Obscura

Try making that part of the blade smaller. So its smaller than your highpoly, not bigger.

musashidan

Haftoof said:

Yeah but there is no more room for GEO due to the limited poly count.   Would a Skewmap help reduce the waviness? 

Surely 2 or 3 more edge loops should  be no prob. Geo is pretty cheap these days.

Haftoof

Not in DOTA sadly... I have 450 polygons for hair and horns...  period.   I can get more in the higher poly version but the low-poly version viewed from top-down has these restrictions.  It doesn't look bad at distance I'm just being stubborn and wanting to see if there are other solutions.  

@obsura, I'll much around  with the placement of the verts a bit in relation to the edge and see what happens.  

commador

A skewmesh won't really help with the type of issue you have. That is more to keep surface details from getting warped. Sometimes, this is just the nature of the beast. How big will this be on screen? I imagine it will be quite fine in the end.

Haftoof

Dota2/League of Legends Sized. 

I figured maybe it was a normal issue with the waviness along the edge.  I played a bit with edge loops when I was still building the low poly and saw some improvement.